Case Study:                 Building Materials Portal Development

The Task

The client wanted to create a national building material web based portal that offered all business materials sold in Japan.

The Client

The Japanese Housing Authority.

The Situation

The Japanese Housing Authority had a database of over 1 million building materials and suppliers. They had images for most of these products and they wanted these merged and a complete web-based catalog created for customers to browse. They also want people to create their own list of products and allow them the ability to take this list and send it out for bid. They wanted this bid list to be created in Adobe's Portable File Format (PDF). In addition, there was a time restriction - the site had to be fully operational in eight weeks - in time for their annual housing trade show.

The Action

The requirements were defined and agreed to. The graphically-rich web site was constructed with complete searching capabilities in Japanese (Kanji). An on-screen Kanji keyboard was built to allow the searching of the products by the typical Japanese user. Bid lists were created in PDF on the fly by the user from the search results pages.

The Results

The entire web site was built in less than 8 weeks entirely in Japanese. They were able to demonstrate their new portal at their trade show and they receive a great response from the users on their new site. They are now using this web site for production purposes.